Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court

Avoid petty laws and useless officials

Balance personal rights with social duties

Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite

Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature

ELBERTON, Ga. – In a remote area populated by ramshackle houses, rusted trailer homes and decrepit barns, a mysterious monument rises from the red Georgia clay, cordoned off from the surrounding cow pasture by a barbed-wire fence.

As seen from State Route 77, the Georgia Guidestones might be dismissed as a roadside oddity, attracting the occasional lost traveler.

There would be no other reason for a tourist to visit Elbert County, Ga., or its main city of Elberton, where entrance signs read: “Welcome to the Granite Capital of the World.” This tiny town 90 miles northeast of Atlanta might not have much, but it does have granite, and this singular fact figures prominently in the story of how it ended up with a monument that manages to both attract and repel, depending on one’s worldview.

At the Georgia Guidestones on a recent Saturday, despite the cold drizzle and cloudy skies, a steady stream of pilgrims found their way to what is known as “America’s Stonehenge.”

Some come to the 19-foot-tall behemoth out of curiosity, having seen one or more of the documentaries about the hidden origins of the Guidestones, such as the 2011 episode of Brad Meltzer’s “Decoded” on The History Channel.

Ellie Crystal’s Crystalinks.com, the Lucky Mojo Esoteric Archive, Welsh Witchcraft and other New Age websites have featured articles on the Guidestones over the years, as have some Christian sites.

An assortment of UFO buffs and New Age hippie-types can be found paying homage to the Guidestones on any given day.

According to the neopagan group Welsh Witchcraft, there have been many rituals performed at the site in Elberton.

“Witches, druids, ceremonial magicians, native American, Christian, and neo-pagan groups have all made use of the site for their own purposes over the last 10 years,” according to an article on the group’s website, tylwythteg.com. “It was no accident that the Guidestones were located near a major geodetic alignment and over a Power Point.”

One young woman on May 17 said she had driven 45 miles to see the monument and was not disappointed. The woman, dressed in black, walked slowly between the stone pillars, as if bathing in some sort of magnetic aura not visible to the uninitiated.

“It feels like I’ve been hugged by God,” she said. “If you look by this stone, it’s like you can see heaven.”

Another young couple came with their 5-month-old baby boy. Unfazed by the light rain, they posed for pictures in front of the monument, then sat on a blanket and had lunch, taking in the moment as they gazed intermittently at the granite edifice surrounded by nothing but empty fields.

But even as some treat the Guidestones as holy ground, others see it as a sinister sign of things to come. In 2008, vandals used paint and polyurethane in an attempt to deliver their own message over the top of the messages inscribed in the Guidestones – “F— the New World Order” the graffiti said.

Others, such as conspiracy researcher and author Mark Dice, have referred to the Guidestones as “The Ten Commandments of the Anti-Christ” and called for their destruction.

“The message of the Georgia Guidestones is absolutely appalling, and the residents in Elberton should be outraged and be fighting to have them removed,” Dice said in a statement posted on his website. “The Elberton Chamber of Commerce acknowledges that Elberton County owns the property, and contrary to other reports, they are not on private land.”

A call to ‘unity’ with a divisive message

Each of the four slabs of granite is inscribed with a set of 10 rules or “guides” for humankind, in eight modern languages – English, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Swahili, Spanish, Hindi and Chinese. The capstone contains the message “Let these be Guidestones to an Age of Reason,” written in four ancient languages – Babylonian Cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Classical Greek and Sanskrit.

The first and most controversial rule etched into the granite stones is to “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.”

This would require the removal of 90 percent of the world’s current population of seven billion people and about 80 percent of the population that was present on the Earth at the time the Guidestones were erected in 1980. This is followed by directive No. 2, to “Guide reproduction wisely, improving fitness and diversity” and No. 3 to “Unite humanity with a living new language.”

No. 6 suggests nations settle disputes in a World Court, while No. 8 urges societies to “balance personal rights with social duties.”

The 10th and final command: “Don’t be a cancer on the Earth. Leave room for nature. Leave room for nature” implies a strong environmental agenda.

Who is responsible for Guidestones?

Part of the appeal of the Guidestones could be the mysterious nature of how they ended up here on a hilltop in Elbert County in 1980. Nobody knows who was behind the placing of the massive carved stones except for a local banker, who was sworn to secrecy. All that is known is a man calling himself “R.C. Christian” – he admitted this was not his real name – walked into the Elberton Granite Finishing Co. in June of 1979 and put in an order for granite monuments that was larger than any the company had ever received. Lots of articles have since been published, including some that speculate R.C. Christian was the front man for a secret society of Rusicrucians, a Masonic order that traces its roots to 17th century Germany and a man named Christian Rosenkreuz.

R.C. Christian told the granite company he represented “a small group of loyal Americans who believe in God.” He gave specific instructions that the monument should be aligned astronomically to serve as “a clock, a compass and a calendar.” A hole drilled in one slab lines up with the North Star while another port hole in the capstone is positioned so that the sun shines through it at 12 noon each day.

The monument’s messages caused quite a stir in this small farming community when they were unveiled on March 22, 1980, before a gathering of about 300. Reportedly Yoko Ono was among the dignitaries in attendance that day. The widow of John Lennon later praised the inscribed messages as “a stirring call to rational thinking.”

But not everyone sees the stone structure’s messages as rational or even humane.

Some see darkness and a cold-blooded call to forced depopulation under a world government.

Dr. Stan Monteith, a retired orthopedic surgeon and Christian broadcaster with California-based Radio Liberty, is one of several researchers who have looked into the Guidestones’ project.

In an article posted on Radio Liberty’s website, Monteith warns of a dire message hiding in plain view on the granite slabs.

“Limiting the population of the earth to 500 million will require the extermination of nine-tenths of the world’s people. The American Stonehenge’s reference to establishing a world court foreshadows the current move to create an International Criminal Court and a world government. The Guidestones’ emphasis on preserving nature anticipates the environmental movement of the 1990s, and the reference to ‘seeking harmony with the infinite’ reflects the current effort to replace Judeo-Christian beliefs with a new spirituality,” Monteith writes.

A tie to the U.N.?

It is hard to look at the 10 guidelines inscribed on the granite and not recognize themes held in common with the United Nations and its well-documented agenda to depopulate the planet and further the cause of global governance.

To understand the Guidestones, Monteith suggests taking a look at the contents of the Earth Charter drafted under the auspices of Mikhail Gorbachev and Maurice Strong from 1994 through 2000.

It was during this timeframe that the United Nations launched its push toward “sustainable development,” a concept adopted by the American Planning Association that has since been at least partially implemented by nearly every major city in America.

The Earth Charter followed the U.N. Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992. Earth Charter serves as the basis for the U.N. document known as Agenda 21/Sustainable Development. The U.S. Congress passed a bipartisan resolution adopting Agenda 21/Sustainable Development in 1992, committing the United States to implement the doctrine in all agencies of the federal government without signing a U.N. treaty.

“In that (Earth Charter) document you will find an emphasis on the same basic issues: control of reproduction, world governance, the importance of nature and the environment, and a new spirituality,” Monteith writes: “The similarity between the ideas engraved on the Georgia Guidestones and those espoused in the Earth Charter reflect the common origins of both.”

Strong, who contributed to a book “Only One Earth – the Long Road via Rio to Sustainable Development,” is believed by some to have inspired the works of Al Gore on climate change.

Another key figure in the creation of the Earth Charter was Steven Clark Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller family and an advisory trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Rockefeller is described as a philanthropist who focuses his financial giving “on education, Planned Parenthood, human rights and environmental causes.”

Planned Parenthood is the world’s largest provider of abortions.

But Gore, Gorbachev, Strong and Rockefeller are not the only wealthy elites pushing for depopulation.

In London’s Sunday Times, an article appeared on May 24, 2009, that described the following meeting.

“Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.

“The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

“Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr., the patriarch of America’s wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey.”

Turner, in a 1996 interview with Audubon Magazine, said, “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95 percent decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

Twelve years later, in a 2008 interview at Philadelphia’s Temple University, Turner said he would settle for a 70 percent reduction, to two billion people living on the planet. “We have too many people. That’s why we have global warming. We need less people using less stuff,” Turner said.

Turner, a father of five children, has also called for a global one-child policy, as reported in a Dec. 5, 2010, article by the Globe and Mail of Toronto.

“Mr. Turner – a long-time advocate of population control – said the environmental stress on the Earth requires radical solutions, suggesting countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time,” the newspaper reported. “He added that fertility rights could be sold so that poor people could profit from their decision not to reproduce.”

Turner was then quoted as saying, “If we’re going to be here [as a species] 5,000 years from now, we’re not going to do it with seven billion people.”

Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of the Queen of England, also shares the opinion that human beings are far too ubiquitous on planet Earth.

“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation,” the prince was quoted saying in an August 1988 article in Deutsche Press Agentur.

Prince Philip, who has fathered four children of his own, has for more than 40 years “been warning that overpopulation is storing up disaster for mankind and that without stringent measures to control it, the planet is doomed,” according to an Aug. 18, 2013, article in the British newspaper, The Sunday Express.

Secret sponsor divulges agenda in pamphlet

Further insights into the agenda of those who financed the Guidestones can be found in the Georgia Guidestones Guidebook, published in 1981 by the Elberton Granite Finishing Co., a copy of which can be found at the Elbert County Public Library.

One chapter of the 50-page pamphlet contains the “purpose” for the monument in the words of the mysterious group that paid for it.

“It is very probable that humanity now possesses the knowledge needed to establish an effective world government. In some way that knowledge must be widely seeded in the consciousness of all mankind. Very soon the hearts of our human family must be touched and warmed so we will welcome a global rule of reason.”

The document refers to the monument as “a cluster of graven stones” whose purpose is “to convey our ideas across time to other human beings… We hope they will merit increasing acceptance and that through their silent persistence they will hasten in a small degree the coming Age of Reason.”

To some Christian leaders, the Guidestones represent a worldly affirmation of end-times deception foretold in the Bible.

David Reagan, founder and senior evangelist at Lamb and Lion Ministries in McKinney, Texas, is one such leader.

“The Bible tells us that Satan disguises himself as ‘an angel of light’ and that his servants disguise themselves as ‘servants of righteousness.’ Isn’t it interesting that the man who financed the Georgia Guidestones called himself ‘R.C. Christian’? Is that a coincidence or a revelation?”

Reagan wrote in an article on his website. “We live in an age of deception. Jesus said that in the end times ‘false christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect’ (Matthew 24:24). We must be spiritually discerning. We must test the spirits.”